Charles Moore

Charles Moore

Charles Moore is The Spectator’s chairman.

He is a former editor of the magazine, as well as the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telegraph. He became a non-affiliated peer in July 2020.

Saturday

Charles Moore

Diary – 7 June 2003

Long before there was any public outcry that Tony Blair had 'lied' about weapons of mass destruction, intelligence sources were worried and some, privately, said so. Perhaps these are the people that John Reid calls 'rogue elements', but their complaints were very sober and unrogueish. They were worried about both the dossiers on WMD, but for different reasons. The first dossier, drafted by John Scarlett, the chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, was, in their view, respectable, but Mr Blair was unwise to have tried to publish such a thing and the Foreign Office should have stopped him. Publication inevitably politicised the intelligence and bowdlerised it in order to avoid compromising sources, and so made it seem weak.

Saturday

Charles Moore

A world without trust

Have a look at the current ten-pound note. 'I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of ten pounds,' it says. The 'I' who is speaking appends her signature. She is someone called Merlyn Lowther. She describes herself as Chief Cashier, and she signs, as the note states, for the Governors and Company of the Bank of England. This note strikes me as an interesting and important example of how trust works. To the sceptic, after all, there might seem to be nothing to trust at all. What is this ten pounds that Mrs Lowther promises to pay me on demand? The word 'pound' was originally a word describing the weight of sterling for which the note stood.